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tapsboy

Google Video was merged into Youtube

Orkut was wildly successful in Brazil and India, until they stopped building it for Buzz and Plus

Reader was hugely successful, which is why the outcry on its closing

Chromebooks are doing great, atleast on Amazon, the world's biggest retailer.

Dart pivoted into a compile-to-JS language, but is still alive

Motorola streamlined it's product lineup under Google and is doing fairly okay for Lenovo

Calling above items as failure is inaccurate. None of them were moonshots btw.

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> Dart pivoted into a compile-to-JS language, but is still alive

Dart started as a compile-to-JS language for web use with a VM for server use, with an browser-hosted VM for development with a long-term plan that compile-to-JS might not be necessary on the web.

And its still a compile-to-JS language for web use with a VM for server use, with an browser-hosted VM for development use.

Google Video, and Orkut, were complete failures and no longer exist. Successful products don't disappear without a trace. If they are closed by management when they otherwise might have succeeded, that is failure.

Reader was a failure according to Google itself, which closed it due to supposed lack of interest. Once again, if the decision to close it was an error by your criteria, then they failed.

The rest I would agree with.

Of course if we go back to the original question, Orkut and Reader were hardly "moonshots" in the first place (and Google Video was arguably just a standard project launch).

Google's own canonical example of a moonshot is Android. By that definition, Orkut and Reader qualify just fine.

> Google's own canonical example of a moonshot is Android

Is it?

> By that definition, Orkut and Reader qualify just fine

If everything is a moonshot, nothing is, etc.

AFAIK both projects were just 20% time projects scaled up to three or four people[1]. A "moonshot" is obviously a wishy-washy term, but opportunity for success doesn't seem to be sufficient to call something that.

[1] http://massless.org/?archive=2007/05/about-google-readers-bi...

> Is it?

Yes. They first used the word when referring to Andy Rubin's departure from Android.

If you watch a video on youtube today it's actually hosted on googlevideo.com or something (i know because uBlock). I assume they threw the youtube backend away when they bought it :) So in that sense google video is still alive, just a different name.

I wound not read too much into domain names. I notice when I log into gmail it goes to accounts.youtube.com.

> Orkut was wildly successful in Brazil and India

If you are Google that reads as "Orkut only got traction in Brazil and India, hence failure". Maybe they could have sold it to some smaller company, but they tried to move the customers to their other services instead.

> Reader was hugely successful, which is why the outcry on its closing

Umm, no. Reader was not hugely successful. Users loved the idea of using Reader but they did not actually use it.

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